War reporters accept they are playing the odds

Thursday 1 March 2012 11:21 BST

Risk is part of the basic currency of any combat reporter. Few battlefields have carried more mortal risk than the besieged enclaves of the city of Homs.

Last week one of our most accomplished colleagues, Marie Colvin, and the brilliant French photographer, Rémi Ochilik, were killed when a shell slammed into their building. This week the Sunday Times photographer Paul Conroy -badly wounded in the same strike -was evacuated in an operation that spells out the risk.

It is thought that at least 13 Syrian opposition activists died in ensuring the convoy got through repeated ambushes. One group of vehicles carrying the wounded correspondent of Le Figaro, Edith Bouvier, and El Mundo journalist Javier Espinosa had to turn back. Espinosa finally escaped last night. The Syrians' losses might seem a cruel calculus to get out one or two Western journalists but the rebels understand the importance of their story being told to the outside world.

Calculating the odds is an almost hourly activity for a reporter under fire. Places of safety, houses, cellars and basements, turn out to be the opposite - obvious targets to an opposing mortar man or gunner.

There are few hard-and-fast rules - each battlefield varies hugely. Some produce old threats in new and uglier forms. In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the threat from the booby trap, or remotely triggered home-made bomb is now pervasive - as they were to a much lesser degree in Bosnia and Northern Ireland.

Fighting in built-up areas like Homs is notoriously difficult to report. The battle is intimate, a struggle to cross a few yards of open space to another building, and anonymous - the enemy you need to fear is largely faceless. Just think of the gruelling scenes reported by Vassily Grossman at the height of Stalingrad, or Mogadishu in 1993, or Sarajevo in the same period. In Bosnia - the first time reporters used armour-protected clothes and cars as routine - we were sniped at on a daily basis.

In Homs the Syrian army's fourth division now seems to be using a huge range of weapons, from tanks and artillery to sniper squads.

The division has Russian battlefield surveillance equipment for ground targeting. Troops would be capable of locating emissions from the reporters' satellite phones and uplinks for pictures - and possibly were listening into any conversation by phone. I now know that in Kosovo, the Russians, through a cruiser in the Gulf of Kotor, were monitoring calls I made to British Army and Nato HQ.

Big news organisations like the BBC send their reporters on "hazardous environment courses" to prepare. I believe such exercises encourage executives to believe there is a rubric of techniques that guarantees immunity for their men and women in the field. Generally the courses are run by former soldiers and encourage reporters to think like soldiers. They shouldn't.

The reporter in the field must work out how the enemy combatant thinks and works, take advice from those who seem to know what's going on, and ignore those who don't.

For in the end, the final choice about odds and risks can be made only by the reporter at the scene of the action. That goes with the turf in our business, as its fallen heroes like Ernie Pyle and Marie Colvin knew too well.